During my pre-ESL
teacher career as a community organizer assisting low-income people to build
power and make social change, an organizer asked me this question:“Have you ever called people apathetic
when they don’t come to our meetings to talk about the things we want them to
talk about?That’s being a bad
organizer.”In
other words, organizers who focused on what they, the organizers, wanted were
unsuccessful. They were blaming that lack of success on what they called apathy
in others.

We called this the
“irritating” approach, one that tended to cause displeasure, annoyance, and
frustration to the people we were trying to organize.We viewed irritation as telling people
what they should want to know along with telling them how they should learn it.

We would contrast this
with an “agitational” approach, one that would, as various dictionaries define
the word, “stir things up” and “arouse interest,” with the goal of “putting
things into motion to produce changes.”

We viewed agitation as
challenging people to reflect on their own knowledge, lives and experiences;
their visions for themselves; what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to
learn it (few wanted to be told and most wanted to do).In other words, we focused on people’s
self-interests.

Teachers can often be
more irritators than agitators.We
have our textbook and curriculum to get through. We have our lesson plans from
previous years all ready to go!I
would like to share a few ideas on how we can more often be agitators,
and not irritators, in teaching English to second-language learners.

RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING

During my organizing
career, we often would say that “organizing” was just another word for
“relationship-building.”You
could quickly identify what people’s self-interests were on the surface, like
getting a better job or owning their own home.But to buildlong-term power for social change it was
necessary to go deeper and find outwhat family or personal experiencesdrove people to want to make those improvements.This important knowledge
could only be learned in the context of a genuine relationship.

We can
begin to build relationships with our students and identify their self-interests
in several ways.If we speak the
student’s L1 or if an interpreter is available, we can have short conversations
with them to learn about their hopes, dreams, and interests.A short written survey can also be
useful, but only if the information in it is used to initiate further
conversation.In a situation where
I cannot speak the student’s L1 and they are beginning students, I have asked
them to begin journals or do projects where they paste or draw pictures
communicating similar information.I have found that making personal visits to student’s homes to be the
most effective tool towards relationship-building.Not only is the effort appreciated, but
one can learn a great deal about a person from what is in their home and from
talking with family members.

Learning English is
just a means to an end for our students.We can learn through building
relationships what these “ends” are for each of our students – do they want to
learn English because they have a specific career in mind, because they want to
use it to create a better life for their children, or for other reasons?

We can use the
knowledge we learn from these interactions to frame the content and character of
our classes in a way that will develop a community of learners, not one where
the expectation is that students are just empty vessels waiting to be filled-up
by the teacher.We can also
encourage the same sort of interaction between our students.

BUILDING ON PRIOR
KNOWLEDGE

In organizing, our
goal was to first learn people’s individual stories and then have them share
those stories with others.Out of
that sharing would come a different interpretation of those stories, which would
then lead to collective action.

Our students have an
enormous amount of knowledge from their previous life experience.A challenge to us as teachers is
to figure out strategies to help students tap into that prior knowledge, have
them share it with each other, and help them develop a different interpretation
of it so they can advance their understanding of that experience to another
level.

We can
have our students write down and draw or paste magazine pictures illustrating
English words they know.Then,
using what is called the “inductive model,” we can have them categorize those
words and challenge them to identify other words that fit into those
categories.We can then model
writing sentences using some of those words and help students develop additional
sentences.Students can then
categorize those sentences and turn them into paragraphs.

We can use K-W-L
charts where students first list what they know about a particular
subject, then have them list connected questions about things they
want to know (for example, prior to a field trip to a grocery store a
student would probably know that they have to pay for items, and might
want to know the English word for the person they pay and want to
know how they could figure out how much items cost before they got to the
cashier if it only had a bar code on it).Finally, they can list the answers they learned to their
questions.

Students can also use
their previous experiences when teachers use Freirian exercises.For example, I recently showed my
students a picture of a man on a street corner holding a sign begging for food
that his children needed.I asked
students to describe the picture, asked them what problem they thought was
represented by the picture, and then asked them to share if they or their
families had ever been hungry and unable to feed themselves.We then discussed what they thought
caused the problem, how they responded to the problem, and what were other
possible responses to the problem.

IDENTIFYING WHAT STUDENTS WANT
TO LEARN

Again, successful
community organizing is based on responding to people’s self-interests.Even within the curriculum
confines that some ESL teachers might face there are many ways we can do the
same with our students.

We could ask them what
kinds of things they would like to be able to talk about in English.We could try out various kinds of
teaching techniques and tools, and ask them to evaluate which ones they think
are most effective for them.We
could ask them if the pace of the class is too fast, too slow, or just
right.We could ask them what
they want to learn.

Much research has
shown that one of the best ways students can learn to read is by regularly
reading books and stories that they are interested in reading.This is a challenge for English Language
Learners, especially beginning ones.One way to respond to this challenge is to help our students take
advantage of the thousands of free audio and animated stories, using both
fictional and expository text, available on the Internet. . I have gathered
links to many of them on my website (http://www.bayworld.net/ferlazzo/english.html).

Language, however, is
a social construct, so it is critical that we don’t just put students in front
of computers and assume that will take care of things.We must also create opportunities where
they can discuss what they have read and demonstrate both verbally and in
writing that they are using the strategies that good readers use.

Other research has
shown that one way students can learn to write effectively is by regularly
writing what they want to write about.One way to do this is to have students keep journals where they can write
about their lives or choose pictures from magazines to cut out, paste and either
describe or write stories about them.

LEARNING BY
DOING

In organizing,
we focused on learning through experience.The most effective organizing lessons were taught inductively where
people learned for themselves. The organizer acted as a guide and did not lay
out all the steps in advance. .

Students can
experience this same sense of self-discovery in many ways.The Language Experience Approach (LEA)
is one well-know strategy to use.We can take our students on field trips, do science experiments with
them, create arts, crafts or maps,and then write about them together.

We can also use the
inductive model that was mentioned earlier.We can create lists of various examples,
also called data sets, of words and sentences and challenge students to look for
patterns and put them into categories.We can create data sets of various
phonic, grammatical, and sentence patterns and instead of telling students
explicitly what the rules are (the “deductive model”) we can have them discover
those patterns themselves.Once
they discover certain patterns in examples that we give them, they can be
challenged to seek out other examples on their own of words that fit those
patterns and create their own sentences that reflect the models being
taught.

Another related
strategy is called “concept attainment” which can be used in a variety of
ways.I use this method to help
teach grammar and writing by taking anonymous examples of students writing
(often taken from their journals) and look for common errors.I will list correct forms illustrating
particular concepts under “Yes” on the overhead, and incorrect forms under “No”
showing each example one at a time until students identify the main “concept”
being taught in the lesson.

These are just a few ideas on how we can be agitators rather than
irritators.They are meant more to
be a compass than a road map.We
can also regularly ask ourselves these questions:Am I building genuine relationships with
my students and know what their self-interests really are?Am I building on my students prior
knowledge, or am I acting as the source of all wisdom?Am I teaching them what they want to
learn, or what I want to teach them?And are my students learning by doing, or am I the one doing the
doing?

At one point in
my organizing career, a volunteer leader spoke to me comparing two
organizers.She told me that she
learned a lot about organizing from one, but learned a lot about organizing from
the other along with learning “how to think better.”The latter is a legacy that
I would prefer to leave with my students and one that is more likely to occur if
I am an agitator in the classroom. Thinking about how we want our students to
describe us after they have left our class is a good start to planning how we
want to teach them.

Larry Ferlazzo teaches
beginning, intermediate and advanced English Language Learners at LutherBurbank High School in Sacramento,
California.He was a community
organizer for twenty years prior to becoming a teacher.